Jay Fahy left his home Wednesday afternoon carrying a piece of paper and a gun. Everything about it seemed odd. Fahy walked outside and turned east, not west. He walked quickly, his head down, jaw set. He did not wave hello.

“It was all so weird,” said Al Raffanello, 56, Fahy’s back-yard neighbor in Rutherford for the past seven years. “He never walks this way — everything he does is to the west. Plus, he always seemed so friendly and happy. But not this time. Wherever he was going, he was determined.”

A few minutes later, Fahy, 58, a former Bergen County prosecutor and a former assistant U.S. attorney with a successful private law practice, was dead. He died of a gunshot, Bergen County Prosecutor John L. Molinelli said, in an apparent suicide.

News of Fahy’s death spread quickly through the region’s close-knit legal fraternity as judges, prosecutors and attorneys struggled to understand how one of their best came to die by his own hand.

“I couldn’t really cope very well today. Jay was a very dear friend,” said John Bruno, a lawyer who met Fahy 20 years ago while the two men served on opposite sides of a criminal trial. “I must’ve gotten 100 calls last night from his friends and colleagues and judges who are just absolutely in shock.”

Compounding the shock is the hard juxtaposition between where Fahy lived and where he died. His home, a white three-story colonial with cozy screened-in porches, sits atop a hill. In the midst of this week’s stifling heat, the yard was cooled on Thursday by sprinklers watering pink hydrangea bushes out front, and by shade from trees so tall and graceful they dwarf the large house.

There was no indication that Fahy intended to leave anytime soon. Scaffolding remains on the roof, which recently was replaced. Workmen have labored all summer to redo the basement, neighbors said.

“From the outside looking in, it looked like he had a successful business and a very busy criminal defense practice,” said Bruno, who lives a few blocks away.

From this beautiful place, Fahy walked eight-tenths of a mile east and north, downhill, to a crumbling NJ Transit bridge so dark and disused it doesn’t even have graffiti. There is no sidewalk, just a dusty track littered with broken glass, discarded PVC pipes and emptied packs of Marlboro and Newport menthol cigarettes.

It was here, behind a low concrete wall separating the trail from busy Route 17, where two boys found Fahy’s body Thursday afternoon. Many neighbors wondered how Fahy came to find himself in such a place, which people in the area drive by every day but hardly ever notice.

“What an odd place to do it,” said Vilma Briccola, 82, who lives across the street from Fahy’s home. “It just doesn’t make any sense.”

Molinelli’s office said Thursday that the handgun Fahy apparently used is a PPK .380, legally registered to Fahy. It was discovered by his body. No suicide note has been found.

Such a dark and lonely ending stands in stark contrast to Fahy’s life, which was marked by professional success and deep friendships.

Six months ago Fahy, Superior Court Judge Edward J. DeFazio and John Bruno’s son Jonathan, also a lawyer, entertained the crowd and servers at Mignon Steakhouse in Rutherford by singing into the night. They sang classics like “Everybody Loves Somebody” by Dean Martin and “You Belong to Me” by The Duprees.

There was no band, no karaoke machine. There was only Jay Fahy and his friends, confident and spreading warmth.

“When he walked into a room, people would say, ‘Oh, Jay’s here. We’re going to be fine,’” said Claire Foy, the clerk in Carlstadt, where Fahy served as borough attorney. “He had such a strong presence, and we all liked him so much.”

For years Fahy organized a summer canoe trip down the Delaware River with judges and fellow lawyers, said DeFazio, who became friends with Fahy when the two worked together in the Hudson County Prosecutor’s Office in the early 1980s.

“Jay was a smart guy, and he had a fantastic sense of humor, and he was always good company,” DeFazio said. “His personality was so large that it really made people feel very comfortable whether they were his co-workers or adversaries, or the witnesses and victims.”

A photo of Fahy hangs inside the Bergen County Courthouse, where he served as prosecutor from 1990 to 1995. A purple ribbon was placed on the picture Thursday, in remembrance. After such an apparently senseless death, the man who now occupies the office down the hall pledged to keep looking for answers.

“We are going to try to get to the bottom of this, so we could perhaps offer an explanation as to why he did what he did,” Molinelli said. “I don’t think we will ever know for sure, but I hope we will have something that his wife and his family can rely on in bringing closure.”

The courthouse buzzed with talk of Fahy’s apparent suicide, with many expressing shock and surprise.

“I was stunned because he clearly presented such a happy smile with great mirth,” said Joseph Rem, a Hackensack criminal defense attorney who knew Fahy for nearly two decades.

Paul Brickfield, a River Edge criminal defense attorney, said Fahy asked him to be his first assistant prosecutor shortly after Fahy was appointed county prosecutor. Brickfield became Fahy’s second-in-command, serving for three years before going into private practice.

“He was a tremendous attorney and a mentor to me,” Brickfield said. “I learned so much about what it was to be an attorney.”

He described Fahy as an extremely capable trial attorney who quickly understood the strengths and weaknesses of criminal cases and was able to offer instructions on how to handle those cases.

“He was never about money in private practice,” Brickfield said. “He liked being a lawyer and he liked dealing with people. He just enjoyed it.”

“We all feel so terrible,” said Foy, the Carlstadt clerk. “This is a tragedy.”